If the website is down, its the API I care about. I've been using my maestro all december and its been flawless, as ever.

I was only using Maestro over christmas since I don't like buying on credit - and all my cards are full anyway... so I experienced plenty of problems. A particularly long wait for my payment to be processed got me some free chocolate in a well-known chocolatier's shop, though the most common problem was having my card rejected and having to try again. It usually worked the second time.

Yup, my Yorkshire Bank Maestro stopped working on the 21st. As did everyone's in front, and quite possibly behind, me in the bank queue as they all too appeared to be in there to say 'Excuse me, but WTF?' So quite a large problem say I.

Tried to buy a gift on Christmas Eve and was told my card had been declined. So rang the bank in a panic to find that all was well, I was nowhere near my limit and they had no idea why it didn't work.

Still embarrassing though. At least I have visa too...

Registration is very fast and password recovery is located in a nice Scottish callcentre. Marginally more intelligible than the Indians if you are an English person ;)

But not so if you are from Wembley. Alperton, Southall or points yonder !!

They were obviously telling Porkies here

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/04/mastercard_maestro_transactions_cockup/

Naughty naught Maestro

I used to work for MasterCard, and I still work in close proximity to some of their employees. Despite the stellar performance of their stock, they have been laying off all their talent in wholesale in an effort to pad their stock prices. Morale and availability are just the beginning of bad things to come from this once good company to work for. I'm just glad I left before the bottom began to fall out.

Big queue outside my bank one day last week, at the ATM. Then found an even bigger one inside. Turned out it was exactly as described above, "the switch card system is down" the tellers were telling people. That's the Clydesdale Bank, cousin to the Yorkshire Bank. The mastercard system was also down. The bank could not help anybody, just apologising and telling people to wait until the system came back up again.

It seems one system came back on separately from the other, but I think it was coming & going for a while.

The two probably are related, but not in the network sense - the website probably went down because of the surge of traffic hitting it trying to find out why their cards were being declined!

Like a few other people here, I did experience a problem paying with my switch card, but it went through the second time, and didn't glitch at all on the many other purchases I made that day, so it sounds like it's just a busy system...kind of to be expected really.

Don't forget, people - this is Maestro's first Christmas since assimilating Switch, it's quite possible they just had more traffic than they expected.

Survived in Spain all of Christmas week on Maestro alone. No problems at all to speak of.

This is in marked contrast with my November trip to Canada when they cut me off with no warning in a Fraud alert. (Apparently they've been suffering high levels of fraud in Canada recently.) They did send a text to my mobile with the phone number I should call ... but my mobile doesn't work on the Canadian neworks. I nearly had to wash dishes for a few weeks to pay my hotel bill!